Category Archives: Experiments

Ok, grasshoppers, so I’m having a little love affair with infographics. I created this one on Pictochart. A good range of themes for beginners, but you can upgrade to pro if you feel the need. I’m happy experimenting at present.

One of the easiest ways to begin to create your legacy is to record, write, declaim or otherwise remember a Pocket Memoir.

What’s in a person’s pockets can be revealing. It may prompt you to revise your usual pocket form and change your ways. Or it may remind you of something you forgot a long time ago – why you pocket things the way you do, or why you don’t pocket anything.

For most of my life, my pockets have been empty, except for a spare tissue. In recent years, due to the exigencies of life, that changed entirely. But the reason why a pickpocket would have been very disappointed in picking my pockets for most of my life is quite simple – I blame it all on Mum.

Yes, mothers like smooth lines, they like non-stretched clothing, fabrics that retain their spring, or their starchy straightness, their minty-fresh, crease-free, just-ironed sparkle. Mothers hate disreputable-looking fashion, hanging carelessly as though it’s been pummelled with river rocks, or turned into a carrybag for spuds and carrots.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a clue where our iron lives anymore. I used to iron hankies, and serviettes. I ironed everything, and then, one day, I didn’t anymore. Fabrics changed, I changed, and the iron went into seclusion somewhere in the house.

Why am I telling you all this? Because empty pockets – they too have their story. If you feature empty pockets, what’s their story? Is it your own choice, or a hangover from someone else’s idea of impressive?

Here’s a pocket memoir I recorded for Ridley Scott’s and Kevin McDonald’s film project Life in a Day. I watched it again recently and realised that what I carry in my pocket now has changed yet again. And I know that empty pockets are a thing of the past for me. How about you, grasshopper, what do you have in your pockets, and why?

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Most of the time, I’m too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other to look up. But when I do, 99 times out of a hundred, I love what I see, whether there are clouds or a clear blue sky.

I decided to create a cloud memoir to remind me of the sky at a particular time. A Few Blinks More

Film actor Meryl Streep says, Everything we say signifies, everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

If we try to live our lives in the now, the present moment, which is all we have – the rest is imagination, projection, fantasy, longing – we can be aware of our own zeitgeist. We can write our own moments purposefully, and with heart and soul together, holding hands.

Where are you right now? Write a sentence – a frugal one, short and sweet – that tells you how you feel. Read it aloud. Does it have rhythm? Does it make you laugh, cry, sad? Does it interest you?

What would you like to do with that sentence? Keep it, erase it, tear it up? Write another one so it has a friend to call its own? Try that. It’s your choice – you have the power to do something, or nothing.

Do the same thing in an hour, the writing thing, that is. Write another sentence that tells you how you feel. Try this thoughout the day, one an hour, surreptitiously if necessary (somethimes workplaces can be quite unhelpful where hearts and souls are concerned), and see how things look at the end of the day.

Do you want to keep going? Good. You don’t? Never mind. In either case, if you’ve come this far, you’ve written a frugal memoir of your feelings for the day. Those sentences are snapshots of moments in your life that will never come again. You’ve preserved them. They aren’t photographs, they’re the purest of all – they’re Graphs – symbols on a line, of you in the moment.

What do you think? Want to do it again tomorrow? Maybe? See you soon.

PS – Don’t forget to carry your notebook and pen(cil) with you as you experiment with the Feelings Frugal Memoir.

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